And hopefully, we can avoid all the weird crooks in cyberspace.

I’m adding one more, and fingers crossed the last warning about fraudsters. Of course, someone, somewhere will find a new angle to try and part us from our hard earned money. And often the target is a writer. Sigh.

It’s a nasty business that requires us to stay vigilant against people who wish to make a buck by crushing our dreams. Don’t let them succeed. 

Writers everywhere, this one included, are setting New Year’s resolutions to publish a book in 2019. However, there are people out there who wish to impede your success. Yes, you heard right. Scammers are rehashing, reworking and launching new attacks with old tricks. Stay alert. There are fraudsters who prey on your desire to publish.

Don’t become another statistic.

A grateful shout out goes to Anne R. Allen for an important article filled with information…

on Just Publishing Advice:

Writing and publishing a book today means you need the best tools

A lot of people have a great book idea.

Writing and publishing a book with today’s technology is easy. All you need is the time to write and finish your book.

However, for many who started to write, there was an unrealistic dream of becoming an author of bestselling books.

The reality of writing fiction books or a nonfiction book is that only outstanding books stand a chance of selling.

If you are new to writing and electronic publishing, it is a good idea to work on practising writing before you start your book project.

It is not that successful authors today need to be professional writers, but writing good books does require competent grammar and writing skills.

But don’t worry. There are plenty of resources and tools available now for new writers to help you learn and improve your writing skills.

Continue reading…

• Write every chance you get. Write every day if you can. You should be thinking about writing or actually writing whenever you can.

• Reading is so important. You should read every chance you get as well. Read good writing and read about writing. Balance fiction and non-fiction to help you improve your own writing.

• Use your everyday observations to help you with coming up with surroundings, characters and situations for your stories. You can do this by keeping notebook with you, or if you’re not afraid of being stared at, use your phone and a recording app and pretend your on a call while you make note of what you see.

• Check your writing for repetitive words and phrasing. If you find yourself using the same words repeatedly, refer to a thesaurus (Shift-F7 in Word) but don’t confound your reader with extravagant utterances and locutions that will flummox them. (Fancy…

Happy New Year to all the Story Empire readers! It’s my first post of the year so I’m getting off to a start with a follow-up tip from one of my last posts of 2018.  Early in December, I shared about using the document template feature of Scrivener. It allows you to create a template internal to your project with differing features and content so you can start writing more quickly without forgetting the important elements for your documents. It makes the process of writing a breeze.

But what should you include in a document template? How much should you include? What’s the benefit of this bit of work? Let’s take the last two questions first.

As to how much you should put into a document template, this depends on your needs. If you need a simple template with all the common formatting for your project then it’s a straightforward…

Predators are on the lookout for scammable new or discouraged writers.

As long as there are writers, there will be writing scams. Hungry predators will always be lying in wait, ready to pounce on any tender young scribe who strays from the safety of the mainstream herd.

And now there are an increasing number of scammers who target the established writer as well—hoping to profit from the discouragement so many indies are feeling as Amazon’s changing policies and algorithms leave them behind.

Continue reading HERE

by ARHuelsenbeck

Today’s article is for teachers and librarians and media specialists as well as for authors of books for children and teens.

When my children were in school, occasionally a form came home explaining that an author was visiting the school and my child could purchase a book which would be signed by the author.

It’s a new year and time for a new series of author interviews.

One of the features of my blog that I have enjoyed the most is my author interview series.

Over the past few years, I have posted over 200 interviews. We have learned about many authors, both traditionally and independently published. We have learned what makes them tick and what techniques have worked for them in creating and promoting their work.

For 2019, I’m looking to post weekly author interviews based on responses to 10 questions. To change it up a bit this year, I’m giving authors 20 questions from which they can choose 10. This will make each interview somewhat unique. These 20 questions are brand new to my blog interviews. This means, if I’ve already interviewed you, you are welcome to participate as we will learn even more about you.

If you participate in my interview…

Yahoo Image Search

Welcome to the only place that provides authors with the merchandising choices of their dreams.  We don’t even charge real money.  Oh, we’ll get to that part near the end because you don’t want to ruin the surprise.  Now, what kind of event are you preparing for?  A convention, a book signing, a contest, a craft fair?  We recently had one author who was promoting her book during a dog sledding competition.  She was in the race and we had to create some specialized merchandise.  So, what do you need?

Conventions are common and simple, but only if you let them be.  The vendor room is cutthroat since people rarely bring enough money to spend on everything they want.  I know they have cards, but many get uncomfortable once that comes about.  You mentioned it being a fantasy series and you already have books to sell as…

on Birds of a Feather Press:

Switching from Amazon Expanded Distribution

I use different distribution models for my various ebooks, some are enrolled in Amazon KDP Select, some are consolidated through a distributor (Draft2Digital), and others use a mix model of direct with the core 5 (Amazon, Google, Kobo, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble) and everyone else through Draft2Digital. It can get complex and messy the more books you have, but I don’t think a one-size-fits all approach to self-publishing is effective if you’re writing different genres of books. Because my ebook distribution models are complex, I’ve kept my paperback distribution model really, really simple—and up until now I’ve distributed exclusively through Amazon KDP print on demand.

I was a latecomer to print, I wasn’t sure the time, money and effort to create an additional cover and do the internal formatting was worth it. But my niches (travel guides…